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With another down day for U.S. stocks, investors are wondering aloud whether the selloff that began taking shape last week will turn into an outright "correction," defined as a 10% drop off its recent all-time highs.

CNNMoney

"Investors are learning the hard way this year that stocks don't always go up," write CNN Money's Hibah Yousuf. "But experts are stressing that last week's big sell-off is not the end of the world.

The piece quotes a voice from the heartland: John Foxworthy, an adviser at Phillips Financial in Fort Wayne, Ind. "I like to remind people that investing is a 'two steps forward and one step back' kind of process. Anytime markets have a good run, like we saw last year, it's not a surprise when we see a bit of a pullback."

Fortune

In 2013, the Nasdaq Composite, a proxy for tech stocks, surged 38.3%, besting the S&P 500 by around 10 percentage points, and it has even managed a small gain this year in a generally falling market.

At this point, Nasdaq's prices are severely stretched, Tully writes. "Whether such calculations will ultimately lead to a correction in the tech index, of course, depends on whether investors care about linking share prices to such antiquated notions like profits." he points out.

By his reckoning, earnings growth for the Nasdaq Composite can sustain levels to generate decent total returns.

"Growing total earnings by 9% a year would indeed achieve the goal of an 8% total return (6.5% capital gain plus the 1.5% dividend yield)," he writes. "And to get there, the 30 stocks would need to lift overall profits by 54%, to $240 billion from their current $156 billion or so.

It won't happen. The reason is that earnings -- to say nothing of profit margins -- are already at all-time highs. So far -- and give these cool tech companies their due -- they've repressed the gravitational force that yanks down on margins in most industries over time."

Meanwhile, if you're not convinced yet about the questionable value of hedge funds, here's one more journalistic nail, courtesy of Motley Fool's Morgan Housel.

Motley Fool

Housel points out that hedge funds should be judged by a measure that sums up the kind of goals that the industry sets for itself in marketing materials. "Sure, hedge fund managers say, maybe we don't outperform the S&P 500. But that was never our goal. Our goal is to manage risk, offering limited upside while protecting investors' downside with lower volatility than the rest of the market."

Based on that standard, Housel writes, these funds should be compared to a benchmark that also tries to manage downside risk, like a simple index that invests 60% of its assets in stocks and 40% in bonds. Vanguard has a 60/40 index fund with a super-low expense ratio of 0.24%."

By that standard then, the average long-short hedge fund, he writes, slightly underperforms the Vanguard 60-40 fund over the past decade.

"The 60/40 Vanguard fund, which anyone can invest in, opening an account in about four minutes and 26 mouse clicks (I counted), beat the average multistrategy and long-short hedge fund over the last decade. And it did it with lower annual volatility (measured by standard deviation)," Housel writes.

Housel should also point out that the Vanguard fund has another major advantage over the typical hedge fund: the absence of a lock-up period.